Latest data shows that a quarter of all the people being treated for COVID, in hospital, caught it after going into hospital for some other reason. What is more, this proportion is increasing rather than falling. That means that the NHS is, perhaps, the biggest single source of COVID infection in the country, behind care homes, though a lot of the infections in care homes was itself a result of the NHS knowingly sending people with the virus back to those homes, where they then infected others. Taking into consideration the nature of the people going into hospital for other causes, and the nature of the vast majority of those dying from it, being the elderly and sick, its likely that an even larger proportion of those dying from COVID in hospital, are people who caught it in hospital.
Let's be clear. This is a national disgrace. We pay a vast amount of money in taxes and national insurance contributions to finance the NHS. The least we should be able to ask is that it acts to protect our health. That, in contrast, the NHS, is one of the biggest spreaders of COVID, and, thereby, sources of ill-health and death should be an immediate cause of outrage. Those who continue to proclaim the NHS to be "our NHS", should be deeply ashamed of themselves for presiding over such an abysmal service. The truth is, of course, it is not "our" NHS at all, we have no control over it. This is worse than the thousands who died, unnecessarily, several years ago, as a result of contracting MRSA after going into hospital, and even worse than the recent scandal surrounding unnecessary baby deaths at Shrewsbury Hospital. And, they are just some of the many scandals. If the same logic was applied to the NHS as has been applied to pubs and restaurants, the government would be immediately closing it down!
In part, the blame can be put on the government that, for ten years, imposed austerity on the NHS, but that only accounts for part of the blame. A larger part lies at the door of the top down, bureaucratic culture of the NHS that, in many ways, mimics the same kinds of lunacies and inefficiencies that plagued the bureaucratic systems of the USSR and Eastern Europe. As the saying goes, shit rolls downhill, and when the layer of the organisation above you engages in self-serving behaviour, is guilty of all kinds of idiocies, and indeed, instructs you to engage in activities that you know are idiotic, the tendency is to comply. Anyone who has worked in any of these kinds of bureaucracies knows that is the case, and that those that rebel at such compliance are isolated and removed. The method of climbing the greasy pole is unthinking compliance, and routine.
So, from Day One, it should have been obvious that, to deal with COVID, what was required was isolation hospitals, or, at the very least, isolation wings of hospitals, where those with COVID could have been kept apart from patients with other illnesses. Any new patients should have been quarantined until such time as it was known whether they had COVID or not, before moving them to an appropriate ward. Staff should, from the start, have had appropriate PPE. In fact, we now know that the virus cannot survive for long on hard surfaces, out of the body, and is transmitted through the air, from person to person, which is why its rarely transmitted outdoors. So, even a simple thing like the wearing of face masks would have prevented transmission in hospitals. But, none of that was done, and, in fact, at the start, the government, following its scientists advice, and the WHO, argued against the wearing of face masks saying that it was ineffective!
A couple of days ago, an NHS spokesman, trying to defend this dismal record of the NHS, said that people on wards in the NHS were “socially distanced” to prevent infection. Well we know what the only actual social distancing is that prevents infection in such circumstances. It is the actual social distance of those that are better off than the rest. It is the social distance that allows those in high income and status groups to be able to afford a private room in a hospital, so as to keep themselves separate from everyone else. For everyone else, who have to make do with physical distancing from others, the idea that they are several feet from other people in the confined space of a hospital ward is simply a joke.
Its no wonder that the vast majority of deaths have been amongst the sick and elderly locked down in the confined indoor spaces of hospitals an care homes.
If this is the level of mentality of hospital administrators when it comes to dealing with this virus, no wonder it has spread like wildfire throughout the NHS. It would be interesting to see whether the same thing applies in relation to patients in private hospitals. I suspect it does not, and not just because of them having private rooms. When thousands died from hospital acquired MRSA several years ago, all of the deaths were in NHS hospitals, not one case of MRSA appeared in private hospitals. When we look back at the start of the pandemic in Britain, instead of simply focusing on these simple measures of creating isolation hospitals or hospital wings, and the provision of even simple PPE, such as the routine wearing of face masks, we had the kind of big measures that the NHS bureaucracy, and its relation to the medical-industrial complex is renowned for. They are big and visible actions that cost large amounts of money, but which frequently do not address the real problems that exist.
For, example, we had huge sums spent on the Nightingale hospitals, which were opened to great media fanfares. The Excel Centre Nightingale Hospital in London, we were told would cater for up to 4,000 patients. In fact, it only ever catered for just 51 patients, and never more than 25 at any one time. They closed within a month of opening, some of them not taking in a single patient. Had that time and money been used to create isolation hospitals or hospital wings, then thousands of people who contracted COVID in hospital, and who subsequently died, would have been saved.
But, what is more had that been done, there is no reason why all of the thousands of patients with other serious illnesses, such as cancer or heart disease, needed to have been turned away from hospitals, or else who felt too afraid of catching COVID to go to them. The result is that far more people have died, unnecessarily, from these untreated diseases than have actually died from COVID, and those excess deaths will continue for years to come, as a result of diagnosis and treatment having been unnecessarily delayed.
As I have said before, this, in itself, was a consequence of the government's narrative that everyone was equally at risk from COVID, even though we know it is a virus that almost exclusively targets the elderly, and the government's narrative that COVID represents some existential threat, when quite clearly it does not, even compared to deaths from things such as cancer or smoking related diseases, which kill more people every single year. This narrative of the government enabled it to hide its own other inadequacies, for one thing diverting attention from the economic disaster that was unfolding as a result of Brexit, but also the likelihood that, even without COVID, the NHS would have gone into another of its annual Winter Crises, as the amount of illness increased as a result of the economic and social policies of the government, and the effects of Brexit imposed itself.
What is more the purpose of that narrative was to justify lockdowns, and the lockdown itself has now had wider disastrous consequences. It has led to the development of a new strain of COVID that is far more infectious. Every organism undergoes continual change. This is simple evolutionary biology. The simpler the organism the more rapid the evolution, and the longer the time period available, the more time for mutation, the greater the changes possible. At the start of lockdowns, we were told that the purpose was to slow down the rate of spread of the virus, we were shown the graphs of the curve of transmission being flattened. Virologists, for example, at Edinburgh University, pointed out that this curve flattening would not lead to less infections or deaths overall, and could lead to more, only that the number would be spread out over a longer time period.
Without curve flattening, a larger number of people would have been infected quickly, and would, thereby, have developed their own immunity to the virus. The fact that a large proportion of the population would then have been naturally vaccinated against it, inside a couple of months, would have prevented its further spread. With less time for the virus to be able to mutate, it would have died out, before this new strain could have evolved. The argument against that has been that a larger number of infections early on would have meant a larger number of deaths, but as the scientists at Edinburgh have shown that is not true. As they say, its not the number of infections that counts, but only the number of infections of the vulnerable part of the population. If the vulnerable 20% had been shielded from infection, it would have been well on the way to dying out by now, and no new strain would have had chance to develop.
The development of vaccines is still not providing a solution, because they are being given in thousands, whereas it requires tens of millions to be vaccinated. At current rates, it will be another year before vaccination provides herd immunity, and before then, even with lockdowns, its likely that simple infection will, instead have created the required that protection. Moreover, its likely to give better protection than a vaccine in relation to new strains of virus. So, again the government is resorting to the same failed policy of lock-downs, but implemented more harshly.
The government's response is very similar to their attitude towards flooding. The real answer to flooding is not to allow development in flood plains, or by rivers etc., in the same way that the elderly and vulnerable should be kept isolated from the danger of infection. Instead, the government allows building in flood planes, and then when the houses get flooded, it seeks to have everyone compensate those whose houses were flooded. Instead of stopping further building in flood planes, it wastes more money creating flood defences, and the consequence of those flood defences is to create further problems, in the shape of sending even more water further downstream so that houses that previously were not at risk of flooding, now are put at risk, just as by extending the time that the virus is at large, enabled it to mutate, and thereby put further groups of people at risk.
What is worse is that there has been absolutely no political opposition or alternative put to the government's policies on either COVID or Brexit from Labour, with Starmer acting as Johnson's second in command, and trusty wing man. We need to build something much better than this.
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